Tell-Tale Heart Syndrome/ The Perry Mason Trick
Rote · Mage
Ideally, a liar will reveal herself through a trick of conscience or a slip of the tongue. One venerable trick, named for Edgar Allen Poe’s famous tale, involves planting subtle mental impulses that drive the liar to confess the truth.
Game-wise, this trick involves a combination of Life 3/ Entropy 2/ Mind 2. Life heightens the target’s anxiety (see Tweaking Chemistry, above), Entropy manipulates circumstances to put subtle pressure on the target, and Mind plants a rising sense of guilt. The trick can work without any one of those Spheres, but it needs at least two of them in order to be truly effective.
The usual truth-seeking systems apply. If the mage succeeds, however, then the liar spills the truth herself, usually in a dramatic emotional fit. Also referred to as “the old Perry Mason trick,” this feat tends to wreck both the credibility and the emotional health of the liar in question. That said, there is one problem with the technique: As interrogators throughout history have learned, some people who aren’t lying will confess to something they didn’t do in order to escape the pressures of interrogation. And so, the Tell-Tale Heart Syndrome sometimes pulls a “false positive” when there’s actually no lie to reveal, and traps a person who’s not actually guilty… or who may be guilty of something else entirely…